


calling from the ward where they don’t accept flowers (proxy remix)

by recrudescence



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Community: remixredux09, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-01
Updated: 2011-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-18 20:35:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur learns to forge. Eames learns to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	calling from the ward where they don’t accept flowers (proxy remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jibrailis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Write your name on the dotted line](https://archiveofourown.org/works/134955) by [jibrailis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis). 



“I want to learn,” says Arthur. “Teach me. Let me study at your feet and feed you grapes and admire you.”

It’s a challenge, as if he expects Eames to refuse. It’s a supplication, as if he’s too tired to bother beating around the bush.

Eames is already flipping open the locks on the PASIV. “You only ever had to ask.”

Arthur talks a good case for himself, giving examples of how picking up a new skill will make him more marketable, but Arthur has pursued many hobbies on the same basis regardless of whether it applies.

Neither of them addresses the issue of Arthur’s net worth these days, not even when Arthur’s too weak to hold his first forgery together and immediately throws himself off a bridge and out of the dream.

“I’ll get better,” he says once they’re both awake.

Eames assures him he will even though he isn’t certain exactly what Arthur’s referring to.

:::

In reality, the diagnosis and the treatment plod on with merciless reliability. In dreams, he can be strong. Eames indulges that with a lack of wariness that might worry him if it were anyone but Arthur.

Arthur, strong and beautiful and brilliant, glares into the mirror with eyes that aren’t his own until the reflection cows in submission. He learns the logistics quickly, with the hunger of a virtuoso who’s past his prime and won’t ever admit it. Putting them into practice is what trips him up on his own ambition.

“You have to feel it,” Eames says, and touches him. Arthur has the physicality down, but he doesn’t inhabit it, wearing it like an ill-fitted suit instead of a second skin. The voice is wrong, the mannerisms are his own trapped in someone else’s body. Maintaining a forgery under pressure is one of the most arduous things Eames has ever mastered, but what Arthur lacks in experience he makes up in savage determination.

“It’s bloody insane learning to uphold it under duress,” Eames reassures him, not for the first time. “What if you’re in excruciating pain and can’t wake yourself up to get away from it without also blowing your cover? What if you have to sleep with the mark and can’t risk slipping back into yourself in the heat of the moment?”

“Show me how to do it right, then,” Arthur sighs. His skin in this form is too dark to show a flush, but his cheek burns under Eames’s cupped palm. “Give me some duress to work with.”

And Eames kisses him with lips borrowed from a woman he once danced with in Milan.

:::

Eames is a consummate craftsman and teaches him well. He has more time on his hands than he once did, is less about hot-footing through high-powered minds than he used to be. Arthur’s imagination is gradually evolving, at long last. Eames makes a habit of turning up in the neighbourhood to track and encourage the process.

“Letting you backslide into boringness would be such a crime,” he deadpans to Arthur, who looks up from swabbing his wrist and arches both brows towards his ever-retreating hairline.

“When, pray tell, did you start combating crime?”

Eames eases the IV under his skin and makes eye contact with nothing else. “Don’t let this go to your pretty little head, but you’re something of an exception.”

All of this is true.

It’s remarkable, Arthur learning to become his roles as they choose them, Arthur learning to set aside pieces of himself and replace them with pieces of others, Arthur melting into him time and time again: a slight woman with an emerald tikka and a sweet smile, a high-powered businessman with a smirk and a wedding ring, a scruffy teenager with stars tattooed up his side. The illusions never waver, whether they’re making love in a garden on the edge of spring while Arthur is a shy blond botanist or having a frantic just-about-to-die fuck holed up in the midst of a zombie apocalypse while Arthur is a femme fatale with thigh-high boots and hell-red lips.

“The fuck was that?” Eames asks him, breathless, laughing, smeared with blood and lipstick.

“Duress,” Arthur answers, and drags his glossy nails up Eames’s back.

There aren’t many people able to forge, or even willing to learn. Eames imagines it has something to do with giving up too much of themselves inside a dream, the terror of shedding their individuality and assuming someone else’s. He can see how that might be frightening, and he’s given up on wondering whether he’s inhuman for never finding it so. This is another topic, one of many, that he and Arthur never discuss.

“Name them,” Eames tells him, murmuring instructions into Arthur’s hip while Arthur wears a golden-skinned swimmer and doesn’t let his guard down once when Eames hauls him from the showers and stretches him out over a bench in the locker room. “Consider where they come from, who they are, who they want to become. They’re only as real as you let them be. So let them.” Slipping his fingers into his mouth, between his legs, sucking a dark nipple into his mouth and Arthur grips his hair and calls him by all the names that aren’t his.

:::

“What,” asks Arthur once, “was the most difficult thing you ever had to forge?”

“The mark was an anime aficionado,” Eames answers, wincing. “I’d rather not go into the details.”

Arthur’s smile lights up the room.

:::

When Arthur lets Eames hold the door open for him and take him to bed, it isn’t a dream. He insists on having the lights off and he snorts when Eames tells him he’s lovely and he drowses off almost immediately afterward, but he lets him stay.

Arthur’s flat is neat and spare and not as lived in as it should be. Eames makes it lived in. He works less, just so happens to be in Arthur’s area increasingly more often. The silver briefcase gleams under the bed.

“You don’t have to do this,” says Arthur, only once.

Eames sees the shadows under his eyes, the paper-thin skin, the fragile fans of veins beneath. Arthur’s gaze is black and blank, his eyelids heavy and half-mast. Eames kisses them when they close and Arthur holds him fiercely, with diminished strength, but as much as he can.

“I need to tell Cobb you’re here,” he mumbles, words tumbling into each other like pills from an overturned container. “He might want to see you.”

It takes a little longer than Eames expects to find the words he needs to tell Arthur that Cobb is dead, has been dead, since the past catches up eventually. By the time they come, Arthur is already snoring. Eames caps the prescription bottles and leaves him be.

Time passes by too fast in the waking world. Dreaming lets them slow it down, draw it out, manipulate it whichever way they please. Eames remembers when Cobb was alive, the joy that radiated from every pore of him when he talked about how Phillipa was graduating from middle school, the way Arthur had been there smiling along as if it was a member of his own family.

By the time she’s graduating from high school, Cobb is gone and Arthur doesn’t attend.

He was never close to the man, but it doesn’t sit well with Eames, the fragments of Cobb Arthur still carries around with him. It doesn’t sit well with him that Cobb gave up everything to be with his children only to have them bewildered by him and orphaned all over again, that Cobb’s mother-in-law made no secret of seeing Arthur as a human souvenir of what Cobb had done, that the kids were shipped off to live with a brother of Mal’s when their grandmother got too tired and frustrated to handle them on her own. The last Eames heard, via Arthur, James was expelled from school for something or other and Phillipa was in some university as far from home as she could possibly get.

When Arthur interacts with them, which is rare, it’s always indirectly. Cobb’s children have had too many brushes with misfortune in their lives and Arthur is just another reminder of that.

The past always catches up, even if it’s a past wrought of necessity. Eames truly believes this, but believes just as fervently that he can be the exception to the rule.

:::

“I’d let you take me down with you,” whispers Eames. “We could.”

They could keep dreaming, lower and lower, levels upon levels down, until life stretches on too long for Arthur to remember who he really is somewhere up above it all. Eames could keep him for a lifetime and more that way, but Arthur is exhausted and won’t ever be able to dream he’s well again and the drugs are getting too strong for him to dream much anymore at all. They know it can’t be long now, but dreaming is a hard habit to kick.

The relapses are the worst, and Arthur tries in his own awful way to lighten the mood by grinning humourlessly and saying that soon there won’t be any more.

Eames buys more food than they can eat, buys silly things so Arthur can chide him for it.

He tries, telling him he could take him down and let him live however he liked. Arthur has always been sure-footed and levelheaded, ruthless in his attention to detail. Eames can’t make himself reconcile that with this older, wiser Arthur who’s so world-weary he’s either ready to throw in the towel without complaint or simply has no fear of death at all.

And Arthur is turning on his heel in the kitchen, glaring, fragments of juice glasses suddenly sprinkling the floor. “Why do you keep bringing this up?”

Eames thinks of the PASIV, thinks of the dozens upon dozens of Arthurs he’s seen and touched and squabbled with, thinks of Arthur’s adamant _I’ll get better_ from their first lesson. “Suppose, just for a moment, that maybe I’m a bit attached to having you around.”

“I don’t know why this is hard to understand, but you don’t want to be with me like this.” Arthur leaves the room, face twisted into a grimace, glass screaming underfoot.

In a life crammed with reckless decisions, the most absurd thing Eames has ever done is let Arthur under his skin in addition to into his mind.

That evening he swears up and down he’ll steal all the guts and medicines and bodily fluids Arthur needs to make him whole again, letting it slip his mind that these days aren’t coming back, not in the world of the waking. Arthur scoffs and snorts and eventually smiles for him anyway, the lines in his face mirthful this time. Seeing him like this, purely himself, without forgeries for a barrier, is terrifying and wonderful and Eames couldn’t be more pleased.

“Organ theft? You’re so good to me.” Arthur’s laughter is too rich for his body. Eames drinks in as much of it as he can.

:::

“Never from memory,” Eames says.

“Just the once,” Arthur says.

Eames is himself this time, ten years, a dozen years, fifteen years younger. Arthur is youthful and gorgeous in his suit, free and fearless and always so put-together when he and Cobb were on the run, fed by adrenaline and need. Arthur, who didn’t hesitate before putting everything on the line even though Cobb was listed as a fugitive and he could go down with him easily if anything went sour.

The gray in his hair, the wrinkles on his forehead, the deep caverns under his eyes are gone. Eames kisses him until he can barely breathe.

It could have gone this way, if they’d been brave enough to let each other in right from the start. If the job had gone smoothly, if there had been no intruders interrupting, if the knife fight had never happened and they had actually had the chance to take a risk. How it could have gone, years back, Arthur’s gaze cutting into him and Arthur’s legs around him and Arthur’s breath stuttering intoxicatingly when he climaxes.

This Arthur is just short of turning twenty-seven, newly a fugitive by association. This is the Arthur who did a tour of Iraq before moving onto black ops and meeting Cobb, still powerful and brutal and full of pride at his own abilities. Always so full of pride.

They reel you in so hard when you’re young, Eames knows, but they don’t give you an inkling of what to do once you’re done. No guidelines on how to transition, no benefit plans for faded stars.

“Someday,” Arthur says solemnly, “I’ll be nothing dead weight to you.”

Eames strokes his back under the sheets, feeling the stretch and ripple of muscle as Arthur sprawls over him. “You’d never be that to me. I wouldn’t ever think that of you.”

“I remember everything about this.” Arthur’s mouth is brushing his collarbone. Eames reaches down, crests a finger over the curve of his lips. “I think maybe we had a fighting chance, but we fucked it up.”

“I know you do.”

Arthur dozes, in the bedroom in a ritzy hotel in Andalucía, and Eames touches him until he’s himself again, until the years creep back into them, until Arthur’s breath slows and he’s warm and solid and relaxed at Eames’s side.

When he stops breathing, starts disappearing, Eames has his arms around him and his nose buried in the familiar scent of his hair even as Arthur fades into nothing. “You don’t have any idea how much I’ll miss you.”

Arthur sighs. Stroking Eames's face with transparent fingers, sadly.

“Eames. Baby.” And Arthur never called him that, barely even called him by name, the one that wasn’t Eames, but when he did it was always beautiful. “I died over a year ago.”

:::

There are some things that can’t be helped.

He isn’t there to see it and it seems unfair that that doesn’t make it any less real.

It should have happened like this, Eames giving him enough pills to let him pass away in his sleep and taking him under so they could be young and alive one last time before he did.

Instead, they never get in a proper goodbye, since Arthur is stubborn until the very end, even when he’s exhausted and wasting away. He dies at a flat he’s renting near his sister’s house because Eames is off working and everyone goes home to die and this sister is the only home Arthur has left.

Of course, Arthur doesn’t put it in those words. What Arthur says is “I haven’t seen Katie in years” and “I need a change of scenery” and “Don’t _worry_ so goddamn much, Eames, you’ll give me an ulcer.”

His sister is a docent, which Eames finds amusing and maybe explains why Arthur is so uppity about art forgeries, and lives with her family in a boring suburban area that he knows would typically drive Arthur mad.

Eames has actually thought of talking to Cobb’s relatives himself, bringing back the kids for one last visit. Arthur is pickier than usual about having company, even though now more than ever Arthur needs people who love him and Eames wants to believe in his heart of hearts that the Cobb children will understand that.

He means to bring it up the next time he sees Arthur, but it turns out there are more urgent subjects that need to be addressed.

“You didn’t tell me it was a relapse.”

Arthur doesn’t look at him. “You didn’t need to know.”

“You could have died without me there.” He can scarcely say it.

“Eames, I’ve died with you a hundred times.” Arthur’s voice is level, but his eyes are plaintive. “This time isn’t going to be particularly exciting.”

Eames means to retort that he doesn’t give a damn how exciting it is, that all he wants is to be allowed to be in the same fucking room as him, that Arthur is the undisputed champion of missing the point. He can’t get a word out. None at all.

Arthur’s hands curl around his and Eames can’t see his face but he hears the breath he draws, wild and tremulous. “I love you. That’s why I wish you weren’t here for this.”

“Stupid, idiotic son of a—” And then Arthur’s lips are on his forehead, Arthur’s fingers are sliding cool and too thin between his own, and Eames can’t even get enough of a handle on himself to swear. Not with Arthur whispering _please don’t_ and _I’m sorry_ and letting him stay.

They’ve had to stop their sessions because Arthur’s doctors have been unforgiving about the traces of Somnacin in his bloodstream and there are things Arthur needs now more than a few sweet dreams. Sometimes he lets Eames hold him, but always sends him away because he can’t sleep unless he’s alone, there with his medical trappings that remind Eames eerily of Maurice Fischer.

It’s an autumn morning, cloudless and crisp, when Eames wakes and realises Arthur’s died without him there after all.

“He didn’t want you to see him like this,” his sister says. “He loved you, but he hated that you had to watch this happen to him.”

She’s crying and her voice is thick and her hands are long and slim like Arthur’s. Eames holds them both and she opens her eyes, wet, a deep and fathomless brown, like Arthur’s. “He didn’t want any of us to see him like this.”

“He never did,” answers Eames. Fussy, perfectionistic Arthur, always like that. “He was always like that.” His voice falters around the second word, reflexively wanting to correct itself.

:::

Eames doesn’t think of himself as having a selective memory, but a diplomatic one. There are parts of his past that do nothing but hold him down if he dwells on them, so he doesn’t. Memories like Yusuf in prison for contraband or Fischer attempting to kill himself six weeks after the inception or Arthur uttering the word _remission_ back when he truly believed it was a possibility, remnants of a time when they were younger and more foolhardy and thought they could keep jumping the fences of the subconscious mind forever.

Eames has always been willing to make sacrifices in the name of the greater good.

He dreams them a bit younger sometimes, just enough for it to matter the most.

When this happens, he doesn’t let Arthur send him out. He sleeps there, holding him tightly until Arthur’s too worn down to be annoyed at him for it, and each and every time he wakes up and Arthur is still there.

“You’re supposed to be gone by now,” says Eames.

Inevitably, Arthur sighs, exasperated and forthright and everything Eames remembers. “I can’t be gone unless you want me to be. I’m just a part of you.”

And this is why they never did this as themselves, as better versions of themselves, for such a long time. Eames knows he should stop, but Arthur’s gaze is heartbreaking and heavy and if Eames just kisses him enough he can make it better.

“Go on,” Arthur whispers, “shoot yourself.” He sounds fatigued. “Wake up.”

“Not just yet, love.”

Arthur’s reaction varies at this point, sometimes angry, sometimes commiserative.

“You know what happens next. We can never see each other again. It’s not working out. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s not me, it’s you.” So softly, his mouth at Eames’s ear, his hands on Eames’s face, skin wet when their cheeks brush. “It’s always you. That’s the issue, isn’t it?”

“And you’re always so sure you know what’s best for me.” He’s smiling when Arthur presses a kiss to his temple and picks up a pillow, lays it against his face like a caress.

Eames wakes alone in a cold, empty bed.

There are messages on his phone, which he doesn’t check. It bleeps like the battery’s dying and there’s the dull roar of his stomach growling since he can’t recall the last meal he ate that was real and not part of a dream. He calibrates the dosage and closes his eyes. Overseas, Eames has bank accounts that groan with the results of his skill, but the ache in his bones and the chipping paint on his walls linger on.

When he blinks, Arthur flickers behind his eyes, young and brave and razor-sharp, before sore knees and thinning hair and trips to the oncologist. Back when they were at the top of a game most people didn’t know existed at all. The briefcase gleams at the foot of the bed.

:::

 _Never from memory_ , Eames says.

 _Just the once_ , Arthur says, and opens his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Jibrailis, you have such talent. It was so hard to pick just one thing to remix. Reading through your work blew my mind and I hope I've done you justice here.


End file.
